Boarding Schools - How do you do attendance?

[E_G_R2]

As the title says, boarding schools, how do you do attendance for your boarders?

 

* Do you do it at all?

* If so is it paper based or through your MIS?

 

I ask as I found out that our day pupils signed a paper register which gets put into a spread sheet as and when. I showed the secretary how to do it in SIMS.net and she was thrilled. Still paper based for boarders and some resistance to using SIMS.net.

 

Thanks

[HMCTech]

What do you mean by registering attendance? When they enter the house or when they sign up to board?

[E_G_R2]

Daily monitoring of attendance.

 

How the school records that the pupil is in. (I know boarders are in anyway, just wanted to know how other boarding schools do this or not)

[PhilNeal]

We are seeing an increasing trend of independent schools recording lesson attendance. The Ofsted inspection technique of following a pupil throughout the day has on many occasions revealed that pupils were not missing lessons because of an alternate curriculum option.

[HMCTech]

Just normal registration as any day pupil. If the register flags them up as absent the houseparent is contacted in place of the parents.

[Andrew_C]

SIMS. But only fairly recently gone away from "Teacher may notice someone missing from his class" method.

[michael2k6]

With only reading the title and nothing else.... Lock em in?

[bclarke]

We use Sims for morning and afternoon registrations. Teachers enter registers directly into Sims.

[CESIL]

With only reading the title and nothing else.... Lock em in?

lol...that was my first reaction

[StacyLarkin]

With only reading the title and nothing else.... Lock em in?

 

And feed them bread and broth, and send them up the chimneys with a sweep, right?

[Chris_]

We do morning and afternoon registers, either directly on our MIS or on paper and then an admin person manually enters them. There's still an awful lot of paper forms that students sign when coming to/from boarding houses so in the event of a fire we would know what building they are in.

[Ketlane]

Morning and afternoon registers, direct into SchoolBase, along with day pupils. Office looks at registers not done - chases teachers (!) and also contacts families of day pupils absent - expected absences and sickness all entered by the office or nurse. No problems at all, attendance data straight into parent reports at end of every term, printouts etc available.

 

Lesson attendance data is useful too - I have heard of a school which discovered (and cured!) what you might call internal truancy as a result of using it; also useful along with a scheme of work so that a pupil who says "You never taught us that" can be told "We did, lesson 4 on Friday 19th January, and you attended that lesson." Since most teachers call a register in every lesson anyway, one-click registration of the whole class is no effort at all.

 

However.....tracing exactly where a pupil is in "free time" - say at a weekend or evening - is never easy and all a school can do is to do what a careful parent would do. Signing-in and out of boarding houses, whether on paper or some other way, works most of the time, but smart pupils will always get round any system if they are determined to do so.